Thursday, 17 January 2013

She was the City of Peace, eternal and ancient. All lesser nations bowed before her high mud walls, many gated, their arches picked out in blue and red tiles in which glimmered bits of the captured rising and setting sun. Temples and brothels, camel trains and a thousand different races all co-mingled beside her green waters, while visitors and citizens alike made love in bowered gardens through which drifted clouds of sweet incense and birdsong. No raiders from the waste could breach her bull and eagle guarded crenellations. All greater ones, those bellicose nations occasionally stirred into orgiastic expressions of war, led by conquering kings, who would send out their vast armies snaking down from the mountains or across the desert, seeking to batter and pull them down, were met with open arms. Doors thrown wide, dancing and singing women and men lining the causeways bestowing flowers, gifts of gold, silver and flesh, they drew off the stream of martial vigour into her carnal embrace. No army could defeat the great City of Peace, for those who might, she seduced, and those who lacked the means to force her subservience, she rebuffed and then enslaved, one by one, be they nomads or merchants, allowed to be led through her postern gates beneath a crescent moon and a flower hued flame.

In the end, the dynasties of the desert and the high passes would disappear, their far flung satrapies rising in rebellion to sunder with civil war the chains which held them all. Kings died, their lines grown weak or dissipate over time and whole kingdoms might evaporate like salt on the plains. But she did not, Daughter-Cradled-by-Rivers. She had been there since the gods had first raised the world from the primordial sea, laid dust upon the reeds, and made a home for themselves and those they created to worship them at the centre of the world emergent. And she would remain, long after, undisturbed by war, famine, and empire, which were mere ripples in her vast apsu of time, that sweet reflecting pool in which she snared both the moon and sun. City of Peace, she would outlast all but the gods themselves, her dancers chanting the same songs they had first learned back when the waters were tamed by the divine breath, and go on with their ancient ways in the alleys and streets of the city long after the final sword was broken and the last chariot had tumbled to dust.